I am pleased to announce that Milliman is again sponsoring the Mid-Sized Retirement & Healthcare Plan Management Conference, March 17- 20, 2013, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, California. This is our third year sponsoring the San Francisco conference, and we are excited to participate again in this educational event for employee benefit plan professionals. The small scale and comfortable setting of the conference create an atmosphere of open-minded discussion and collaborative problem solving, where plan sponsors can share ideas with their peers and gain access to insight from industry leaders.

The conference will address both healthcare and retirement plan topics, with sessions designed to appeal to HR and benefits representatives of small and mid-sized companies, as well as CFOs and other company officers with plan fiduciary or risk management responsibilities.

This year's program features an extensive agenda of more than 45 workshops that will guide attendees through current issues facing employee benefit plans. In the healthcare track, the conference workshops will cover strategies to prepare for the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2014; analysis of how a company's benefit plans can create the right benefit mix to fit the unique needs of each organization; and more. On the retirement side, the workshops include strategies to improve retirement readiness, analysis of investment platform options and considerations (target date funds, stable value options, and annuitized income strategies), and more, including these two by Milliman:

Reducing Retirement Plan Risk in a Volatile Market, presented by Steve Hastings and Mahrukh Mavalvala. This session will cover types of risk inherent in defined benefit pension plans and approaches to mitigate them, including plan design, asset allocation, and settlement strategies. The pros and cons of each risk mitigation strategy will be discussed.

Fee Leveling in DC Plans: Disclosure is Just the Beginning, presented by Genny Sedgwick and Nate Sherman. In the context of heightened disclosures and scrutiny of fees and revenue sharing in participant-directed retirement plans, how well do plan sponsors (and participants) understand the allocations of fees in their retirement plans? This session will discuss various fee allocation strategies, the incorporation of revenue sharing in a plan's fee assessment methodology (fee leveling), and the fiduciary considerations therein.